Story by Ron Cobb
Special to the St. Louis Tennis Hall of Fame
In anticipation of the 2024 opening of the new St. Louis Tennis Hall of Fame at the Armory, 2016 inductee Ron Cobb has written a “What’s Up With” feature on every living Hall of Fame member. Ongoing, he is also writing regular features about the Hall of Fame and the Armory. And you can expect stories and other media about all our inductees, living and in memoriam.
Gene Fluri has tough decisions to make when mornings roll around at his winter home in Naples, Fla. What’s it going to be today? Golf? Maybe bocce ball? How about a game of bridge? Or a trip to the fitness center?
Talk to the 73-year-old Gene these days and you’re liable to hear the word “lucky” quite a bit. He and his wife, Marcia, spend five months a year at their villa in Naples and seven months back home in St. Louis in a condo overlooking Forest Park. “I’ve just got a nice old-person’s life,” Gene said in early April. “We’re very lucky.”
Gene didn’t have children with his first wife, Pam, despite their best intentions. She died of cancer at age 47, and it wasn’t until he married Marcia 11 years ago that Gene discovered the joys of being a dad, or, in this case, a step-dad. Gene now is blessed with four step-children and six step-grandkids.
“I don’t think I fully realized how much fun it is, and what I was missing not having kids all those years,” he said.
To his step-kids and grand-kids he is “Big G” because that’s what one of the younger grand-kids called him when the boy first met the 6-foot-2 Gene. When Gene took some of the grand-kids to a game at Busch Stadium, 5-year-old Winston gave him this gem of a tribute: “Big G, you’re my best friend, and when I get older we’ll be even better friends – if you’re still alive.”
Marcia played tennis at Town & Country Racquet Club when Gene was the general manager years ago, but it wasn’t until they were fixed up that a relationship began. Marcia was on the board of Washington U.’s Kemper Art Museum, as well as a docent at the Art Museum, and she had an interior design company that she’s now sort of phasing out of. Art wasn’t Gene’s thing, but they did share an interest in bridge.
Gene started playing bridge as far back as college at Mizzou. He played competitively for a half-dozen years and then began teaching the game. Until COVID, he had 90 women taking lessons. Post-COVID, he’s cut back a bit. He still has a few groups, including one that Marcia helps him teach at Bellerive “where we have a drink and learn bridge. It’s just nice people, and we’ve made a lot of friends through bridge.”
Gene would love to have a racket in his hand now and then, but mobility issues prevent him from playing tennis and pickleball. In his younger days, Gene was a master with a racket. In the early ‘80s, there was an All-Racquets Tournament in St. Louis that consisted of two-man teams competing over a three-day weekend in six sports: tennis, racquetball, squash, platform tennis, table tennis and badminton. As many as 15 teams would enter.
Gene and his brother Tom won it four or five years in a row – Gene can’t recall. The tournament lasted only a handful of years.
It was in tennis, of course, where Gene made his mark. In high school at McCluer, he and Tom won the state doubles title in 1968. When Tom wound up at Mizzou after a year at Kentucky, the brothers won the Big Eight Conference doubles championship.
And then they came home to St. Louis and engaged in a spirited competition with stalwarts Bill Heinbecker and Jerry Johnson for the title of the city’s best doubles team. Gene recently described Bill as the most competitive person he’s ever known.
No slouch in that department himself, Gene conceded he’s nearly that competitive, but “I think Heinbecker did a better job of channeling it than I did. I always wanted to win, but he was such a fierce competitor, and I’m not sure I was always up to the challenge like he seemed to be more often than not.”
On more than one occasion, Gene has cited his singles championship in the American Tennis Association’s national tournament as his proudest tennis achievement. He said it had the biggest impact on his life.
The ATA bills itself as the oldest African-American sports organization in the country. Winners of its national championships have included Althea Gibson, Zina Garrison, Lori McNeil, Mali Vai Washington and Arthur Ashe.
In 1969, Richard Hudlin brought the tournament to St. Louis.
“He decided it was time to integrate, and the St. Louis kids and adults, we all played and somehow, miraculously, I won.
“I’ll never forget at Dwight Davis, getting into the car, and in those days CBS had Win Elliot giving sports updates at the top of the hour. I heard Win Elliot go through the baseball scores and then tell me I won the tennis tournament, which I thought at the time was pretty cool.
“The big thing is they had a tradition where they sent their national champion to Washington, D.C., for another tournament, and I’m sure poor Dr. Hudlin was caught in a mess there by paying to send a white kid to D.C., but they did. It was virtually all blacks in the tennis tournament and a few white kids. I stayed with a black doctor and their family, and it was the best experience of my life.
“It taught me diversity and that everyone’s the same, and here I was, just a shy white kid in a black community, and it taught me we’re all the same regardless of race, color, etc.”
In retrospect, I asked Gene, did you possibly feel guilty for taking a title that a young minority player might have won?
“I was too young, self-absorbed and narcissistic at that time to even consider that,” he said.
Looking back on his tennis career, Gene said “tennis was great for us because we made so many friends. From my perspective, the best part was playing with Tom all those years. Nobody could have a better partner or brother than Tom. Anytime a ball went up in the air, my job was just to get off the court and let him whack it.”